It's my turn on the BlogTour The Fourth Victim by John Mead. The story combines police procedural with a rather controversial psychiatric disorder.
About the Author
Born in the mid-fifties in East London, on part of the largest council estate ever built. I was the first pupil from my local secondary modern school to attend university.
I have travelled extensively during my life from America to Tibet. I enjoy going to the theatre, reading and going to the pub. It is, perhaps, no surprise that I am an avid ‘people watcher’ and love to find out about people, their lives, culture and history.
Many of the occurrences recounted and the characters found in my novels are based on real incidents and people I have come across. Although I have allowed myself a wide degree of poetic licence in writing about the main characters, their motivations and the killings that are depicted.
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Buy The Fourth Victim
About the book
Whitechapel is being gentrified. The many green spaces of the area, which typify London as a capital city, give the illusion of peace, tranquility and clean air but are also places to find drug dealers, sexual encounters and murder.
Detective Sergeant Julie Lukula doesn’t dislike Inspector Matthew Merry but he has hardly set the world of the Murder Investigation Team East alight. And, it looks as if the inspector is already putting the death of the young female jogger, found in the park with her head bashed in, down to a mugging gone wrong. The victim deserves more. However, the inspector isn’t ruling anything out - the evidence will, eventually, lead him to an answer.
The body of a young woman is discovered in a park. The police are able to establish that her death was very recent and that there doesn't seem to be any witnesses or possible suspects. That's after they make a lot of assumptions about her. Turns out she isn't the only victim of a confused and erratic killer.
There was this blasé attitude to the investigation in general and a lot of consorting with witnesses or people who then skew the narrative. Not exactly professional, despite the explanations towards the end of the story. I think the emphasis on all the horizontal tangoing, flirting and romantic relationships detracted from the crime element of the story. The focus should have been on the why and the whom, instead of the sexual escapades of the police detectives.
Keeping in mind that the whodunnit aspect is quite complex, it needs a lot of explanation and veers into a quite a few different directions. At the same time sometimes less is more, which means although the story needed attention to detail perhaps the wrong details were presumed more important than others. It is a wee bit disjointed and confusing at times, nothing a nip, tuck, tighten and edit couldn't fix.
Mead combines police procedural with mental health issues or rather a controversial psychiatric disorder. The controversy of the diagnosis allows for a certain amount of freedom in the plot development and the level of crazy in the story.
Buy The Fourth Victim at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer.
Buy The Fourth Victim at Waterstones
Publisher: The Book Guild (24 Oct. 2018)
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